“The Federal Reserve created $3.267 trillion out of thin air in a few months; that’s $22,600 for every taxpayer in the USA. Your share is at most $1200. The other $21,400 created out of thin air went to corporations, monopolies, and other financial parasites and predators.” – Charles Hugh Smith

Tax Fraud Is An Earned Benefit For The Wealthy “Many people in this country clearly believe that being in the position to finagle your taxes, like the having the chance to cheat on your wife with porn stars and supermodels, is an earned privilege.”

‘Freedom payments?’ The coronavirus exposes the fraud of the anti-government movement. “The stated premise of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was to goose the economy, which it didn’t do (annual growth was exactly the same in the two years prior to passage as in the two years after — 2.4%). So it didn’t make America stronger. What it did was weaken the federal government, by looting the treasury to feather the nests mostly of corporations and the already rich. This withering of the government has always been part of the point. But where are the adherents of this now — now that we’re in trouble? They’re clamoring for their own freedom payments.” To bailout corporations and Wall Street.

[W]e calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.

From Harper’s Index (Jan 2020): “Average effective tax rate, as a percentage of income, paid by the richest 400 households in the United States in 2018: 23. By the poorest half of American households: 24.” (due to state taxes and to loopholes)

Evidence suggests that the tax cuts — particularly those for high-income households — did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.

In fact, the economic expansion that lasted from 2001 to 2007 was weaker than average. A review of economic evidence on the tax cuts by Brookings Institution economist William Gale and Dartmouth professor Andrew Samwick, former chief economist on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, found that “a cursory look at growth between 2001 and 2007 (before the onset of the Great Recession) suggests that overall growth rate was … mediocre” and that “there is, in short, no first-order evidence in the aggregate data that these tax cuts generated growth.”

In comparison, the economic expansion of the early 1990s — which followed considerable tax increases — produced a much faster rate of job growth and somewhat faster GDP growth than the expansion of the early 2000s. An analysis of business activity between 1996 and 2008 found that even the sharp cut in dividend tax rates in 2003, which proponents claimed would spur immediate business growth, had no significant

How Much ‘Inequality Tax’ Are You Paying? If you measure wealth by the median income — that point at which half the nation’s population has more wealth and half less — then Switzerland holds up as a strikingly wealthy nation. The United States does not. Typical Swiss adults turn out to hold $228,000 in net worth, the most in the world. Typical Americans hold personal fortunes worth just $66,000.”

Big businesses are faring better than ever under the Trump era tax law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). According to analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), 60 Fortune 500 companies avoided paying all federal income tax in 2018 (with their total average effective tax rate being roughly -5%). That’s more than three times the number of companies that avoided paying corporate taxes on average from 2008 to 2015.

“Amazon—and 56 Other Corporations—Took Your Tax Dollars. Sixty profitable corporations paid no federal taxes in 2018, twice the number that typically paid nothing in the years before the 2017 tax breaks took effect. In fact, it’s worse than that. Fifty-seven of these corporations demanded rebates from the government – which means taxpayers like you and me paid them to exist. These are corporations on the dole. They claim to hate socialism if it means Medicare for All, but they sure as hell love socialism when it’s welfare for them.” ” Last year, individual taxpayers provided more than half of federal income tax revenue and corporations contributed only 7 percent. Just four years ago, corporations accounted for 11 percent and individual taxpayers 47 percent. ” As you can see in the following chart, the percent of revenue coming from Payroll taxes and Individual income taxes has increased, while the percent coming for the Corporate Income Tax has decreased.

Those wondering how many zeros Amazon, which is valued at nearly $800 billion, has to pay in federal taxes might be surprised to learn that its check to the IRS will read exactly $0.00.

According to a report published by the Institute on Taxation and Economic (ITEP) policy Wednesday, the e-tail/retail/tech/entertainment/everything giant won’t have to pay a cent in federal taxes for the second year in a row.

This tax-free break comes even though Amazon almost doubled its U.S. profits from $5.6 billion to $11.2 billion between 2017 and 2018.

Bolton Threatens to Force Africa to choose between US and ChinaThe “West’s” political economies are spent forces, incapable of either keeping up with China’s phenomenal domestic growth — which should be seen as Beijing’s re-assumption of its historical status as the center of the world economy — or of competing with China in what used to be called the Third World. The system is collapsing at its imperial center, the United States, which is incapable of investing in its own crumbling infrastructure. Nor can the US maintain its non-military federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service.

The Golden Age of Rich People Not Paying Their Taxes “An eight-year [Republican-led] campaign to slash the IRS’s budget has left the agency understaffed, hamstrung, and operating with archaic equipment. The result: a hundred-billion-dollar heist.” I have a friend who works as an examiner for the IRS; he said the same thing: they’re woefully understaffed.

The Great Kansas Tax Cut Experiment Crashes And Burns From Forbes. “After four years of below-average growth, deepening budget deficits, and steep spending reductions, the GOP-dominated Kansas legislature has repealed many of the tax cuts at the heart of Governor Sam Brownback fiscal agenda.”

“When congressional Republicans passed their so-called tax-reform bill, they preserved the deduction for charitable contributions even as they capped the deduction for state and local tax payments. Thus a hundred-million dollar gift to Harvard will still be fully deductible, while, in many parts of the country, the property taxes paid to support local public schools will not be.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, in The New Yorker, Aug, 27, 2018